Gates Gone? Not So Fast… (Updated)

The headline writers have decided: Bob Gates is leaving the Pentagon next year. But is that really the case? The Defense Secretary has a history of departure declarations — only to rescind them, when the President asks him to stay.

That’s the quote that launched editors and bloggers into a thousand declarations that Gates was gone.

It’s a little odd, considering that Gates in 2007 kept a countdown clock that ticked off the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until January 20, 2009, when President George W. Bush would leave office and Gates could retire to his home in the Pacific Northwest. At the time, Kaplan asked Gates if he thought he might stay into the next administration. “The circumstances under which I would do that,” Gates replied, “are inconceivable to me.”

Then President-elect Barack Obama asked Gates to stick around in a November 2008 meeting in a Virginia hotel room, shortly after the election. Suddenly, it all became quite conceivable. Gates said yes, right away.

At the time, the Iraq war had already turned for the better, and Gates’ talk of overhauling the Pentagon was mostly just talk.

Perhaps the Afghanistan war will be in just as good shape by, say November 2011. Perhaps Gates’ project to streamline the Pentagon’s bureaucracy will have reached a suitable conclusion by then. Perhaps President Obama won’t ask Gates to remain on, again.

But my guess is that if either of these two big projects are unfinished, Gates will stay. He doesn’t strike me as the type to have a losing war or a losing fight with the military-industrial complex as the final mark on his decades-long government career. The career public servant also doesn’t strike me as the type to turn down an Oval Office request. As Kaplan notes at the end of his profile, “if the president does ask, Robert Gates has always been the type to say, ‘Yes.'”

UPDATE: “I’m not sure what the news is here. This is not Secretary Gates announcing his retirement. This is the Secretary musing about when it would make sense for him to finally bow out. He has long said he would not serve the whole term and now he has told Foreign Policy that he thinks it best to leave with enough time on the administration’s clock for his successor to be effective,” e-mails Geoff Morrell, Gates’ press secretary and confidant.

“However,” he adds, “I would remind you all that every time Secretary Gates has seriously considered hanging it up for good, he ultimately has decided to keep serving so my personal advice would be to wait for a real announcement or better yet wait to see what happens next year.”